TL;DR, as my initial review turned into an essay: War Thunder is a game that could be great with its staggering abundance of military vehicles modeled with great detail, an unparalleled damaged model, and yet it’s ruined by an absolutely dishonest, money-hungry, evil developer with no respect for their players.



I'm not an active player anymore, but with 459 hours stretched over 7-8 years (with a few long breaks in-between) I decided to speak up, as there is an on-going uproar of the community, perhaps the largest I've seen in years (glad to see the boiling point has finally been reached).

In short, my experience is based mostly on playing Ground Forces, Arcade Battle and Realistic Battle, across Germany, USSR/Russia and the USA. I have had very little experience (or patience) to play Aviation, and have not played any Naval whatsoever.
War Thunder is a unique game on the market due to its sophisticated, unparalleled damage model, and an insane amount of playable vehicles. For a military vehicle enthusiast it is something that I could play for years, if it wasn’t for an absolutely money-hungry, anti-human approach of the developers.
My point of interest has always been on tanks, hence I dedicated most of my playing time to that. Back when I started, there were only 3 Ground Forces factions: the USA, USSR (no post-Soviet vehicles back then), and Germany. Through the years, even despite focusing most of my efforts on those 3 trees, I did not manage to reach the top tier on any of them. I admit, I dislike grind, however, back in 2015 or 2016 the end game was considerably easier to reach for all players, as there were simply fewer vehicle tiers per tree, as well as fewer vehicles overall. Back in those years the game was already considerably grindy, though that did not bother me as much back in the day, as I preferred to focus on WWII-era vehicles anyway. Overall, it was, though the game could be frustrating. Besides, due to the design of the game, playing for free was bearable by around Tier 4. At that point, the economy was definitely set against a player, and with higher repair and module costs it required good performance and won battles to progress.
Events, and especially crafting events ultimately revolved around the grind as well, being designed in a way where F2P players could not even hope for the top prizes without several hours of grinding daily for the duration of an event (meaning 2-3 weeks). Shame, as some event vehicles were notably more interesting or better than others on their tiers. Yet, that was no coincidence, of course.
It wasn’t until 2020 when I first got myself a premium account and started playing more regularly. The game was definitely more pleasant that way, as the grind wasn’t that unbearable, yet it was still there. What I realized over a few months playing on a premium account was that I was still slowly progressing through the grind towards more grind, as higher tier vehicles required ridiculous amounts of research points (and silver lions) to unlock. I stuck to it and kept playing for the sake of it, until I reached a breaking point – one of “economy balances” of 2021 when Gaijin decided to reduce RP and SL gain by about 20%. To me, that was something that tipped the scales, as I felt cheated and blatantly robbed of something I paid for, and dedicated hours to. Imagine this: you crate a game with hundreds of vehicles spread across several different nations and research trees. Even a single of those trees requires hundreds of hours of gameplay to complete. Yet, instead of making it easier for players, especially for those who play real money for a premium subscription, you purposefully make it harder, introducing an infuriating, soul-crushing grind as a core element of your product. This is what this game has become over the years: an abundance of great content locked away behind a massive grindwall, all led by an utterly terrible, and extremely greedy developer valuing money above anything else and milking the playerbase to its limits, while being deaf to most of the negative feedback, and coming up with nonsensical justifications of pushing the limits of grind even higher.
In short, not-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-recommended.